The email came just before Father’s Day last year. A young woman wanted to know how to sign her dad up for my memoir-writing class. The request made me a little nervous. What if her dad didn’t like to write? Didn’t want to write? Couldn’t write? It’d be a gift, she said. A gift for […]

Chicago friends who read Mondays with Mike this week have been asking what I thought of the inauguration ceremony for our new mayor. Monday was the very first time I have ever attended an inauguration ceremony of any kind, and if they’re all like that one, I’m going again! I hadn’t even thought of attending […]

Back in 2014 the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed piece I wrote that was titled “Should ride-sharing services adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act?” Five years have passed, and Lyft and Uber still claim they don’t have to follow ADA guidelines. A story in Politico last week reports that Lyft is fighting a federal […]

Lucky us! In the past ten days Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I have had the privilege of visiting nine different classrooms at five different elementary schools. Somehow, some way, we also managed to wedge a visit to a college classroom in the midst of all those visits to third-graders –last Tuesday we gave […]

A week ago today my sisters accompanied me to Peach Plains Elementary School in Grand Haven, Michigan—my Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I were giving a presentation to Brenda Wittkopp’s fourth-grade class there. Since Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is a picture book, some schools figure the older kids won’t be interested in what […]